1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to behavior analysis and in particular to means for analyzing the behavior of members of a customer segment. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to an improved system, method, and program to track the migration of individuals from one customer segment to another.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many businesses, it is helpful to track the behavior, attitudes, or characteristics of individuals in order to better serve them or target them. To do so, a technique called customer segmentation or clustering is used, which classifies the customer into groups with common characteristics. For example, a retail business will often group customers by their buying habits, e.g., customers that purchase women""s apparel as opposed to those that purchase consumer electronics. Many customer characteristics can be studied, including customer demographics, types of purchases, amount and frequency of purchases, etc. By grouping the entire class of customers into individual customer segments, it is easier evaluate and respond to many aspects of customer behavior, such as knowing where advertising dollars are and are not having an effect. Because of the widespread use of credit cards, personal checks, and xe2x80x9cpreferred shopperxe2x80x9d cards, it is now relatively easy to track the buying habits of the great majority of customers.
Segmentation is well established, but provides only an instantaneous snapshot of the characteristics of each segment. A conventional segmentation analysis does not provide any insight into what the segment or its members will do next or have done in the past. That is, there is no view of the changes over time of a segment member.
Tracking how people change segments over their lives is an extremely difficult proposition, in part because there is no good visualization that make the results approachable or useful to an analyst. For example, while it is possible, using conventional means, to provide snapshots of customer segments at two different times, and to manually compare the member lists, this is so tedious as to be useless. It would be desirable to have a means for easily visualizing the migration of individuals between segments.
It is therefore one object of the present invention to provide an improved method for behavior analysis.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved means for analyzing the behavior of members of a customer segment.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide an improved system, method, and program to track the migration of individuals from one customer segment to another.
The foregoing objects are achieved as is now described.
The preferred embodiment provides a system, program, and method which makes segment migration, the movement of individuals between segments over time, easily trackable and provides a visualization that makes the results of the analyses useful. The preferred embodiment tracks which people are in which segment at each time period, then builds a file that gives, by person, a description of which segment(s) each person belonged to during each time period. From this table, a display is drawn which indicates in an intuitive manner the migration of members of different segments over time.
The above as well as additional objectives, features, and advantages of the present invention will become apparent in the following detailed written description.